Street sexual harassment: breaking the silence in Yemen

Young women’s rights
activists are using new media to give a voice to the 90% of Yemeni women who
face street sexual harassment. Yet support for the campaign has been far from unanimous; it has come face to face with a new form of patriarchy in the media,
says Ghaidaa al-Absi. (Also in Arabic.)

I was nine
years old the first time I was subjected to sexual harassment on the streets of
Yemen. On the way back to my home in Sana’a, the capital, we caught a public
bus. On the bus, while I was dreaming that when I become older and have a job I
will buy lots of chocolate and dolls, suddenly I felt something touching me
down my back. I was sure that it would be a cockroach or an insect, so I didn’t
move or scream. I didn’t want to show my father my fear; I loved to show him my
bravery, even when I was scared. I was uncomfortable with the tickle down my
back, which continued for approximately ten minutes. When we got off the bus I
discovered what the tickling actually was and it made me experience a type of fear
that I had never experienced before. The tickling came from the fingers of a
man in his thirties who was sitting behind me. Once we got off the bus, I saw
his face through the window, sending me kisses and dirty looks. I was too
scared and drowned in silence and shock. I couldn’t tell my father; I didn’t
tell anyone. I lived in fear for five days, hating every man in the universe
except my father.

Right now
I’m in twenties and I still remember this incident. Unfortunately it isn’t the
only time I’ve been harassed. Sometimes I find myself thinking, how many other children
and women has this man molested? How long will we remain silent and let these
predators invade the dreams of our children and destroy the self-confidence of
women?

Every day
women walk down the streets and they face sexual harassment. Unfortunately it
becomes part of our daily life, and we women are forced to adapt to it either
by being silent or by yelling at the harassers. With friends, I decided to
break the silence and to draw attention to the phenomena of street sexual
harassment in Yemen. We proposed a campaign called ‘Safe Streets’ anti-street
harassment to Tacticaltech (Tactical
Technology Collective), and they got behind us.

The main
goals of the campaign are to achieve a culture shift through giving space not
only for women, but also for men to speak out about what is happening to them on
the streets instead of keeping it behind closed doors. We want to mobilize
people, decision makers, and police officers to form a new law to penalize
harassers.

As part of
the campaign we designed an electronic map
where victims have a space to report harassment cases and indicate the
location. For instance, on 7th May, 2012 we received a report from a
man in Taiz city saying that he had seen a shop owner trying to hug a girl, but
that the girl was scared and pushed him away. We got another report from a girl
saying that a group of men in a car were stalking her in Sana’a. Through this map
we aim to detect the hot spot streets and collect data. This information will
help us to expand the campaign in the future and support us in lobbying police
officers to station more patrols in these areas. The data will also map the scale
of this phenomenon, allowing us to put pressure on decision makers to form a
new law.

A picture sent by a supporter

The
campaign has also included activism through art. Between 25th - 27th
October 2011 we hosted an exhibition of local artists’ work on streets sexual harassment, and
produced a video
to engage public opinion. The campaign team also designed a digital platform
for women and men to blog for the cause.
Right now we are preparing to publish a book called "Happening down the
streets”, featuring the stories of women who have experienced sexual harassment
on the streets of Yemen. We’re also going to step up our offline activism so
that we can reach those people who do not use facebook or the Internet.

Since we
began the campaign a real discussion has begun around sexual harassment. People
have also begun to act, writing to us about their experiences and their opinions
about what needs to change. People sent in photos of themselves holding signs
with a message to show their disapproval of what is happening. One featured a
baby holding a sign reading, “plz, don’t harass my mother!”

Another photo sent by a supporter

Yet support
for the campaign has certainly not been unanimous. Some people have claimed
that the campaign actually promotes sexual harassment, or that we have actively
set out to defame the honor of Yemeni girls. We recently read a statement on the website
Yemen Street from someone saying that we should apologize for giving Yemeni
women and men a bad reputation.

Through the
campaign facebook page we have already opened a lot of discussions and there
are many questions that remain unexplored: we have noticed for example that
many people think that whenever a girl does not wear what they deem to be
‘appropriate clothes’ people have the right to harass her. Others continue to deny
the existence of street sexual harassment in Yemen, or keep telling us there
are other issues in our society that are more important than street sexual
harassment and that we should care about those instead. Women's rights issues
are simply not a priority for some men and women.

The worst
is when the media is involved in encouraging this mentality, or is even complicit
in concealing facts about women’s issues. Our experience with Alhayat Daily newspaper, which is very well
known newspaper in Middle East, based in Saudi Arabia, Ryadh, is a case in
point.

The
newspaper contacted me in February 2012 through a journalist asking me
questions about the Safe Streets campaign in order to write a report about
sexual harassment in Yemen. On the campaign Facebook page we had given some
statistics, based on a report resulting from a regional conference organized by
the National Center for
Women's Rights and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on sexual harassment across 16
Arab countries, including Yemen. The conference report
said that 90% of Yemeni women face street sexual harassment.

This information,
already posted on many international and local websites, was quoted by the
journalist in his report for the Alhayat Daily newspaper. The title of the article
was "90% of Yemeni women are victims of sexual harassment, and the
Internet is their haven.”

Three
months on from the publication of this article, in May this year, Alhayat newspaper
deleted the statistics from the online version of the article and apologized in
their newspaper and on Twitter, claiming that the figure 90% was over
exaggerated.

The apology,
published on Twitter and in the newspaper

They
published this apology after a few men on Twitter asked the newspaper to delete
the statistics, claiming that they were wrong and that they implied that all
Yemeni men were harassers. The article’s new title reads “Victims of Harassment
and the Internet is their Haven". So the newspaper not only deleted the
statistics, but also the word "women".

We hoped
that the newspaper had based this decision on subsequent research or investigations,
something to prove that the statistic was not true or that fewer than 90% of
Yemeni women face sexual harassment daily. Yet there was no such survey. This
was a big shock for us. How could this very well-known Middle Eastern newspaper
be swayed so easily by this small group of men on Twitter? How could they delete
such important information about women’s suffering on the streets of Yemen?

Many people
tried to communicate with the newspaper, to tell them that this kind of
behavior is not professional. We even sent the journalist and the newspaper a report,
"Baseline Study on Fighting
Streets Harassment against Women in Yemen" which was conducted by
the Athar Foundation for Development,
and funded by the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). This report says that 98.9% of Yemeni
women are facing streets sexual harassment in the capital. The newspaper is yet
to respond.

The
incident with Alhayat raised many questions: why did they respond so quickly
the will of a small group of men, and why did they ignore us in spite of the proof
we sent to them? We are facing a new form
of patriarchy in the media. Faced with this we must seize the chance to end the
taboo of talking about sexual harassment and act together to break the silence.

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